


Out of one, many

by cuneifire (orphan_account)



Series: birdcage, gleaming in the nightlight [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 18th Century, 19th Century, Alternate History, American Revolution, Gen, Historical Hetalia, M/M, vaguely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 12:05:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18446204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: “It’s not freedom if I constantly have to fear you.”“Then fear me.”And don’t ever leave me.





	Out of one, many

England sits at his desk, fingernails scraping over the long cut in his forearm. Pain strikes routinely up his nerves. He ignores it.

Instead he stares blankly at the papers on his desk, bayonet askew across the mahogany, interrupting the words.

His fingernails traced red over the paper. The wound was still bleeding, but he couldn’t bring himself to wrap it.

In the palm of his hand he held a coin. Shiny, bright, mint condition.

_E pluribus unum._

_It had been raining the day England found it. Stomping through the grass of the battlefields, gritting his teeth and swearing up and down to the tune of America’s name._

_“Fucking insolent brat. Always looking down on me, thinking he knows better, what the bloody hell happened to him-“ He had spit aloud, kicking a rock aside as he approached the main square of the city._

_As he walked up to the headquarters, running his fingers over the pence in his pocket, he’d seen it._

_E pluribus unum, the coin wrote, shiny and newly minted._

_And England had picked it up, for reasons he couldn’t tell. And even after America had lost, he’d kept it, although it wasn’t worth shite._

He turned the coin over in his hand, watching red seep onto his papers.

 _Proposal for taxing arrangements of 1803,_ he knows it reads.

He can’t fucking look at it.

So instead he focuses on his wound.

It’s a shallow cut, nothing more than an intense scrape of nails across war-worn skin. It didn’t even hurt that much, because that’s all the fight had been; a scrap, America being frustrated for the millionth time over his own incapacity to win a war that was twenty years past.

He deserved being thrown in that cellar, England thinks. He’d been acting up recently, talking about dissent among his people or some other garbage like that. Absolute nonsense, the things that boy has in his head. Almost as bad as when he’d read nothing but Locke and Paine and moaned about taxation (what was that thing about tea again?). Absolutely dreadful, that, England thought.

But he still couldn’t make his eyes raise to the paper.      

Instead, he fixes his gaze on the blood.

It hadn’t been anything, truly.

_Then why did the coin feel so heavy in his hand?_

He stared at it. Averted his eyes from it. Looked at it. Did everything he could not to look at it.

In his mind’s eye he could see America’s expression before England slammed him into the cellar-

_-But what if you’re wrong, England, what if he’d have been better off without you-_

Nothing.

He looks down at the mockingly shiny coin.

_America bruised easily, he always had. England had heard glass shattering when he locked the door shut. He wondered if America was more cut up than he was, eyes bruising, crying those watery tears of his._

It gleams in the light.

_Wasn’t England supposed to protect him? Why wasn’t he there to- to wrap his cut, tell him it’d be okay, give him a pat on the cheek and say it’d all be alright because he was there?_

His heartbeat ticked up.

_Why…_

He shut down the thought before it could progress.

He had papers to work on.

He had papers to work on, but he could not look at them.

_Well, that makes the job rather hard to do, now doesn’t it._

His eyes go to the bayonet instead, tracing the gun and the long gleaming blade attached to it with intensity.

_E pluribus unum._

_‘Out of many, one.’_

_That’s what the coin had said._

He looks at it, at the engraved head of some goddamned lowlife colonial and the motto and the date. 1792, over two decades ago.

_Why can’t he just let go?_

_Maybe I should give it to him._ England thought. Would that make him happy?

-No. It would only remind him of days gone past; days that were no longer, would never,  _could_ never be allowed to exist again.

_He’s mine now. Like he’s always been._

_Then why does he feel so far away?_

America would throw the coin in his face. No point in giving it to him, if it would only strike up that rebellion that always seemed to burn in him like an ever constant wildfire.

England shook his head. He didn’t have time for this. There was no point to dwelling on the past, on what could have been,  _on that feeling he’d felt when America had looked at him like-_

Nothing. No point at all. He dug his fingers into the handle of the gun, feeling wood splinter painfully under his fingers.

He stared at the coin. Frowned.

He tossed it out the window, turning back to his papers, and signing them without another thought.

**Author's Note:**

> E pluribus unum- Default motto of the US until ‘In God we trust’ was adopted in 1956. 
> 
> I'm not sure i will ever be continuing this. just thought it good to inform.


End file.
